PROLOGIKA BLOG · IDEAS FROM THE FIELD
Practical perspectives on Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, semantic models, and the work of turning data into insight.
Explore the latest articlesIf you have some time amidst the holiday rush, join me on Monday, December 9th, at the Atlanta BI meeting, where I'll present Visualization Options in Microsoft BI. "Confused about visualization choices for your BI solution? How should you design a dashboard to impress your management? Don't know what presentation options exist for organizational and self-service BI? Join us to find answers to these questions…
Read article
Just got myself upgraded from MCTIP BI (which retires on January 31st, 2014) to the new MCSE BI certification by passing the three required exams. Over the course of almost 20 years, I've managed to stay current and accumulate a healthy dose of certifications (some of them retired by now), including: 1996: Microsoft Certified Professional 1996: Microsoft Certified Solution Developer 2002: Microsoft Certified Application Developer…
Read article
Out of 26 applications, our BI solution for Recall Corporation was nominated as one of the six finalists for the BI and Analytics Innovation Awards presented tonight by the Atlanta TAG B/I society! Although we didn't win the award, we're honored to be shortlisted. Eric Falthzik, Co-chairman at Technology Association of Georgia - Business Intelligence and Analytics Society and Director of Customer Intelligence at Cox…
Read articleScenario: A custom application needs to display a filter dialog to prompt the user to select accounts from a tree consisting of thousands of nodes, such as a tree that organizes the accounts in levels. Once the user makes the selection, the application passes the account list to a report parameter so that the report can show the data for the selected accounts only. Issue:…
Read articleDimension data security is a great feature of Analysis Services and one of the top reasons to strongly consider a semantic layer in your BI implementations, as I mentioned in my "Why Semantic Layer" newsletter. That's because the server automatically secures the cube at connect time so you don't have to implement your own security framework and secure every report query. If you are new to…
Read article
Somehow, this PowerPivot for SharePoint gem escaped my attention but it's a very important deployment enhancement that was more than likely initiated by Power BI and the cloud. Starting with SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 1 and SharePoint 2013, you can set up a dedicated SSAS server in SharePoint mode outside the SharePoint farm and configure the farm to point to it. This was possible…
Read articleLots of public appearances this month! I'll be presenting "Best Practices for Implementing an Enterprise BI Solution" at SQL Saturday Charlotte BI Edition on October 19th immediately after SQL Pass. I hope to see you there!
Read articleI believe that the Pareto 80/20 principle applies well to a sound BI strategy where 80% of the BI needs should be addressed by Organizational BI (data warehouse, semantic layer, dashboards, operational reports, descriptive analytics, predictive analytics, big data, etc.) and 20% should be left for self-service BI. One of the areas where self-service BI excels is to promote lateral thinking. A business users can…
Read article
In my previous blog, I was somewhat hard on Oracle for not testing their connectivity software property. On a positive note, I like their effort to integrate Oracle Developer Tools with Visual Studio. This video provides a nice intro to this feature. Basically, Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio fulfills the same role as the Visual Studio built-in support for SQL Server, including designing objects,…
Read article
Getting two mega vendors to work together - always fun. On a positive note, the experience further reinforced my love for SQL Server. Scenario: Installing Oracle 11g 64-bit and 32-bit clients on Windows Server R2 64-bit machine for both development and testing. As you would recall, BIDS (aka SSDS in SQL Server 2012) is a 32-bit application. So, is PowerPivot if it runs in 32…
Read article
